In current and evolving cellular systems, it is generally very difficult to offer a uniform user experience, (e.g., throughput, quality of service (QoS), and the like), because at cell-edge the user-experience is limited by interference from other cells. This problem is even severe when the frequency reuse factor is one. It has been proposed that different cells may use different sets of component carriers (CCs). However, this scheme leads to an effective frequency reuse factor being greater than one, which is not favorable for a traditional macro-cell scenario to maintain efficient spectrum utilization.
Furthermore, the support of multiple CCs for carrier aggregation (CA) is typically limited to one serving evolved Node-B (eNB). This excludes the possibility for a standard compliant wireless transmit/receive unit (WTRU) to maintain a data connection simultaneously with CCs on different eNBs.
It may be desirable to provide a method and apparatus for simultaneously connecting a WTRU to several different transmission sites on different CCs in order to improve cell-edge performance.